Sylvia Fein

Sylvia Fein was an American painter and author born in Milwaukee in 1919. She studied art at the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1938 to 1942 and became part of the Wisconsin Magic Realist circle. From 1944 to 1947 she lived and traveled in Mexico, continuing her work in egg tempera.

Fein moved to Northern California in 1947 and received an M.F.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1951. Her paintings range from psychologically charged figures and mythic subjects to self-portraits and Northern California landscapes. After a long pause from painting beginning in 1973, during which she published Heidi’s Horse and First Drawings: Genesis of Visual Thinking, she resumed painting in 2003. BAMPFA surveyed seventy years of her work in Sylvia Fein / MATRIX 275 in 2019–20.